by FDR
The Roosevelts divided their time between Springwood, an elegant town house at 15 Washington Square in New York City, and long vacations abroad. When in the city, whether on business or for the social season, James frequented the Union League, the Metropolitan, the Century, and the University clubs. Travel was facilitated by a private railroad car, the Monon, which stood on a siding off the main Hudson River line, a few hundred yards from Springwood.* The outside world rarely intruded. As a reflective biographer has written, James “seems to have enjoyed business much as he had enjoyed trotting. It was a challenge and worth working at, but it never ran his life.”17
Sorrow came gradually. In 1875 Rebecca’s health began to fail. The symptoms of heart disease were unmistakable. Doctors ordered her to stop climbing stairs. James installed elevators at Springwood and the house in New York, but the symptoms grew worse. In August 1876 James took Rebecca aboard his yacht for a cruise on Long Island Sound, hoping the sea air would ease her cough. Shortly after they got under way, she suffered a massive heart attack. James put in at New York harbor and carried her home to Washington Square. She died there on the twenty-first of August and was interred at Hyde Park.
Two years after his mother’s death, Rosy was graduated with honors from Columbia. Following the path laid out by his father and grandfather, he became engaged to the debutante of the year, Helen Schermerhorn Astor, the daughter of Mrs. William Astor, the fabled arbiter of New York society.18 Rosy was enormously attractive, exceedingly sociable, and utterly without ambition, save to live a life of privilege. Insofar as the Astors were concerned, he represented unassailable Knickerbocker lineage and the prestige that attached to the families of original settlers. Regardless of their lack of accomplishment, the Roosevelts were prominent members of New York’s old guard, and a Dutch pedigree still counted for much among the city’s social elite.
Rosy and Helen were married in the autumn of 1877. Helen brought with her a trust fund of $400,000 (roughly $7 million today) and a mansion on Fifth Avenue.19 Rosy shelved plans to study law and like father and grandfather settled in to manage the matrimonial estate. He and Helen bought a smaller property adjacent to Springwood, where betwixt the social season in New York and annual pilgrimages to Europe, the couple enjoyed the leisure their wealth permitted.
James had been forty-eight when Rebecca died. After a suitable period of mourning he commenced a one-sided courtship of his favorite cousin, Anna “Bamie” Roosevelt, TR’s older sister. Bamie was just twenty-two and by all odds the most talented of the Long Island tribe. Alice Roosevelt Longworth insisted that if Bamie had been born a man, she, not Theodore, would have become president. Bamie was fond of James, appreciated his company, but never considered him a romantic interest. When he proposed marriage in early 1880, she was stunned. Not wishing to hurt him directly, she passed the proposal to her mother, Mittie, who, being an old friend of James, let him down gently.20
Perhaps because she felt sympathy for James, Mittie now played matchmaker. Two months after his proposal to Bamie had been rejected, she invited James to a small dinner party at the Roosevelt home on West Fifty-seventh Street. Bamie and her sister Corinne were there, along with an old family friend, Richard Crowninshield of Boston. So was a young woman whom Bamie introduced as one of her closest friends, Sara Delano. James was captivated. Sara was twenty-six, one of five spirited daughters of Warren Delano of Newburgh known to New York society as “the beautiful Delano sisters.” Tall at five feet ten, slender, with a sophisticated manner and a regal carriage, Sara was the very image of the ideal American beauty popularized by Charles Dana Gibson. Her expressive eyes and chiseled features set her apart from those who were merely pretty. A strong chin suggested substance and determination. In a word, Sara had what the English called “presence.”
James responded as Mittie had anticipated. “He talked to her the whole time,” she told Bamie after the guests departed. “He never took his eyes off her.”21 Whether James had met Sara before is unclear. The Delanos were every bit as grand, much richer, and far more accomplished than the Roosevelts.22 Like the Aspinwalls and Howlands, they were an adventurous seafaring family and traced their lineage to the Mayflower. The Pilgrim who chartered the ship, seven of its passengers, and three signers of the Mayflower Compact were Delano forebears.23 Sara’s paternal ancestor Philippe de la Noye was reputedly the first Huguenot to land on American soil, arriving in Plymouth in 1621.24
Sara’s grandfather, the first Warren Delano, went to sea at nineteen, became a merchant captain in his early twenties, pioneered clipper ship trade with the Orient, and retired to the whaling industry in New Bedford. Her father, Warren II, born in 1809, apprenticed himself to importing firms in Boston and New York, and at the age of twenty-four sailed for China as supercargo aboard the clipper Commerce. At Canton he secured a junior position in the tea-exporting firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company, later Russell and Company, the largest American firm in the China trade. At thirty-one he was a senior partner, heading the firm’s operations in Macao, Canton, and Hong Kong. Two years later, having been in China nine years and amassing a considerable fortune, he returned to the United States on home leave, where he met, courted, and married Catherine Robbins Lyman, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Judge and Mrs. Joseph Lyman of Northampton, Massachusetts.
The bride and groom sailed for China on December 4, 1843, and remained there another three years. Warren continued to run Russell and Company, increasing its profits with each successive season. At the end of 1846 he resigned his post and returned to America to stay. His twelve years in China had netted a fortune of more than a million dollars. With that, he entered an exclusive circle of not more than a dozen Americans.25
In New York, Warren threw himself into business with the same force and vigor that had paved the way for success in the Orient. He invested heavily in New York waterfront property, railroads, Tennessee copper mines, and coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town near Wilkes-Barre was named Delano in his honor. He owned clipper ships and paddle steamers, including the first boat on the Sacramento River servicing the California goldfields. By the early 1850s he was well on his way to earning another million.
Befitting their wealth, Warren and Catherine lived at Colonnade Row on Lafayette Place, nine unusual Greek Revival houses linked by a common portico.26 Washington Irving lived in one, as did John Jacob Astor, the founding father, widely regarded as the richest man in America. So did Warren’s younger brother Franklin, who had recently married Mr. Astor’s granddaughter Laura. Franklin Delano, “Uncle Frank” as Sara called him, and for whom FDR was named, was also in the shipping business but had recently retired to manage his wife’s immense trust fund.
Warren and Catherine summered annually at Danskammer Point, six miles above Newburgh on the west bank of the Hudson. In 1851, after much looking, they purchased a sixty-acre estate four miles downstream. The brick and stucco house was modest, but had a commanding view of the river and the Hudson Highlands. Warren named it Algonac and immediately set to convert it into a rural sanctuary for his growing family. Already there had been five children, and eventually there would be eleven, of whom Sara, born September 21, 1854, would be the seventh.27
To redesign Algonac, Warren engaged Andrew Jackson Downing, the premier landscape architect in America, who was then laying out the grounds of the White House, the Capitol, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Downing converted the house at Newburgh into an Italianate villa of forty rooms and added a large square tower and deep verandas, as well as a compatible gatehouse, several barns, greenhouses, and stables. Plantings were designed to provide bloom or greenery year-round, and at Warren’s direction a broad lawn was constructed, sloping down to the river. The house was furnished with equal attention to detail, emphasizing Warren’s years in China. To tend the estate required a permanent staff of ten, with temporary help hired as needed.28
The Delanos prospered at Algonac, and Warren’s business affairs flourished.* That is, until t
he summer of 1857, when without warning the giant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, the second largest bank east of the Mississippi, abruptly closed its doors. Panic struck the nation’s financial community. Years of wild speculation in railroads, coal mines, and real estate had vastly inflated stock prices. The market dropped 50 percent overnight. Banks suspended specie payment, thousands of businesses closed, commodity prices plummeted. Federal troops were called out to protect government buildings. In San Francisco, the fledgling banker William Tecumseh Sherman went under. In Missouri, Ulysses S. Grant was driven off his farm. Across America prosperity turned sour. Tens of thousands of people lost everything they had.
Warren Delano was caught in the downdraft. He was always an aggressive investor, and the collapse in stock prices found him dangerously overextended. For two years he fought to remain solvent as one after another of his investments failed. He cut back spending, sold the townhouse on Colonnade Row, and even tried to sell Algonac. All to no avail. In January 1860, at the age of fifty, Warren Delano faced bankruptcy.
“Warren has various projects, mostly impractical,” wrote his brother Ned. “One is to go to China to do business five years and return with a fortune.”29 Which is precisely what he did. Leaving his family at Algonac, Warren sailed for Hong Kong, where he organized another trading empire. This time it was not tea but opium—open, notorious, and far more profitable—a business not strictly legal, but nevertheless one conducted with the acquiescence and cooperation of Chinese authorities.30 Warren supplied medicinal opium to the War Department to alleviate the suffering of Union wounded, but that was scarcely his only market. “I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral or philanthropic point of view,” he wrote his brothers from China. “But as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honorable and legitimate trade; and to say the worst of it, liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of wines, Brandies, and spirits into the UStates, England & c.”31
By 1862 Warren’s fortunes had improved to such an extent that he brought his family to join him. “I suppose it was altogether terrifying to my mother to give up her beautiful home and its peaceful security,” Sara observed, but if so, her mother said nothing about it.32 Warren leased Algonac to Abbot Low, the patriarch of another great mercantile family, and from Low chartered the Surprise, one of the sleekest, fastest clippers on the China run, to transport his family. For seven-year-old Sara it was the journey of a lifetime: four months at sea on a 183-foot square rigger with only her family and the crew. It was more like a yacht than a ship, Sara recalled. Seventy-five years later, she would entertain her great-grandchildren at Springwood by singing sea chanteys she learned from the sailors.33
Down the river hauled a Yankee clipper,
And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow!
She’s a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper,
And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow!
For FDR, his mother’s trip to China was another family legend he could not resist embellishing. Two days out of New York, Surprise sighted a steamer to leeward that the captain feared might be a Confederate privateer. It proved to be a British mail packet bound for Bermuda. For the president, it was the dreaded Alabama. “I have a copy of the log of the clipper ship my Mother and her Mother went to China on,” he wrote to Felix Frankfurter in April 1942. “They passed the Confederate commerce destroyer Alabama in the night but were not seen.”34 The fact is, the Alabama was lying unfinished in a shipyard near Liverpool when Surprise set sail from New York and did not put to sea until July 1862, by which time the Surprise had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and was in the Indian Ocean. The president often told the story of his mother’s narrow escape from the Alabama, and none of his friends corrected him. It was part of FDR’s charm: a good story was sometimes preferable to an accurate one. The president kept a wooden model of the Surprise on the table behind his desk, and two paintings of the ship hung on the wall of his study.
In 1864 Sara and three older children were sent home to resume their schooling. Two years later they rejoined the family in Paris. Warren Delano had succeeded far beyond his expectations in China and toyed with the idea of residing permanently in Europe, perhaps on an estate in the Pyrenees. “I should want it to be isolated from our countrymen or others who would speak English habitually, and I should want to organize my household as to combine the real comforts and proper luxuries of life with a system of order and regularity of studies, duties, exercise and recreation.”35 Finding nothing to suit him, Warren settled for an opulent Right Bank apartment in Paris overlooking the Avenue de l’Impératrice (now the Avenue Foch). It was the time of the great Paris Exposition and construction of the Eiffel Tower. Sara recalled seeing the crowned heads of Europe as they passed her balcony. Even more impressive was the sight of Count Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, walking alone and unattended from exhibit to exhibit.36
From Paris the Delanos moved to Dresden and took a commodious apartment on the Christianstrasse, near where the Roosevelts wintered the year before. Sara attended a local school, where she studied German and music, and formed a lasting appreciation for the masterpieces at the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie. In the summer of 1868 most of the family went home to Algonac while the older children remained in Germany to complete their studies. Sara attended finishing school in Celle, a medieval city north of Hannover, where she lived with the mayor’s family. Summers were spent on the island of Rügen in the Baltic and the Harz Mountains. In June 1870, as hostilities threatened, the children returned to Algonac aboard the Westphalia, the last passenger vessel to leave a German port before the Franco-Prussian War. Sara had been away from home for almost eight years, and abroad for six.
Under Warren’s tutelage, life at Algonac was a disciplined round of reading, letter writing, and entertaining, interlaced with the New York social season, archery, boating, and riding. From the age of eighteen, Sara was a regular at the balls, cotillions, and dinners of the city’s most fashionable families. Rita Halle Kleeman, Sara’s friend and biographer, reports that she was an avid dancer and could waltz an evening away to the Vienna melodies of Johann Strauss or experiment with popular new steps such as the Galop and the Boston.
If Sara fell in love, it was with the young Stanford White, whose aunt lived nearby. “Stanny” was a frequent visitor at Algonac and apparently fascinated Sara. In 1876 he commenced to court her seriously, and Sara responded. White was one year older, but at twenty-three his prospects looked dismal. Boastful, boisterous, and irreverent, he had been working for five years as one of several underpaid draftsmen for the great Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Yet, as White’s biographer noted, beneath the offputting exterior lay a gargantuan capacity for work and a contagious obsession with beauty.37 Aside from Sara, few recognized it. Warren Delano despised White, called him “the red-headed trial,” and found nothing that would recommend him as a son-in-law. When Sara persisted, Warren urged her to go abroad and reconsider. Ever dutiful, Sara agreed to visit her sister Dora in Hong Kong, where Dora’s husband was now the senior representative of Russell and Company. Sara was away nine months. When she returned to Algonac in September 1877, she had come around. White called once more, but whether he was received by Mr. Delano or saw Sara is unclear. The romance was over. But as one member of the Delano family later recorded, “Sara loved only one man in her life, and that man was Stanford White.”*
It was three years after Stanford White that Sara met James. For James it was love at first sight, and he set out on a resolute courtship. Sara’s motives are less clear. James was fifty-two, she was twenty-six—the same age as James’s son, Rosy. She was also two inches taller. Her father had objected to Stanford White, but James satisfied basic Delano requirements: sufficient wealth so as not to be suspected of fortune hunting, demonstrated maturity, and impeccable lineage. He was also kind, considerate, handsome in an elderly way, and, unlike White, very much a gentleman. That settled it for Sara. The age diffe
rence would take care of itself. So too the height. Above all, at twenty-six—old by Victorian standards—she might never have another opportunity. It required someone as bold as Stanford White, or as secure as James, not to be intimidated by Sara. Writing to her son on the eve of his first run for the presidency, she acknowledged as much. If not for James, Sara wrote, “I should now be the ‘old Miss Delano’ after a rather sad life.”38
Having made her decision (Warren reluctantly approved), Sara was steadfast in her devotion. The couple were married in an understated ceremony at Algonac on October 7, 1880. After vows were exchanged and a brief reception, the bride and groom departed in the Delano carriage for Hyde Park. At Milton, roughly halfway, the Roosevelt coach awaited. The wedding couple took their seats, and James grasped the reins and drove the remaining distance to Springwood.
The Roosevelts spent the next month together at Hyde Park before embarking on an extended honeymoon in Europe. Twice when James went to New York on business, Sara returned to Algonac, and twice the Delanos visited Springwood. Throughout their married life, James and Sara always journeyed to Algonac for family celebrations: Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and anniversaries. In that respect, the Delano tie prevailed.
On November 7, 1880, the Roosevelts sailed for Europe aboard the White Star liner Germanic, the newest ship on the Atlantic run. They spent the next ten months abroad, visiting friends and relatives, enjoying the leisure of first-class travel as they slowly toured Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and the British Isles. On Sunday morning, August 21, 1881, the Roosevelts attended services at Saint Peter’s Cathedral in York. Sara reported in her diary that she nearly fainted, “giving James a little fright.” She was already four months pregnant, and it was time to return to Springwood. On September 1 they boarded the Germanic again, and ten days later they were back in the United States. It had been a perfect honeymoon. “James was wonderful in the way he did it all and we have had such happy days,” wrote Sara. “He has been untiring and thoughtful of everything.”39
